Need some listening practice in English that is authentic and fun for students? Pick an interesting podcast episode and create exercises around that! Is it that simple? Yes it is! Listening practice in English is important for any language learner, and there are many podcasts out there that are great for practicing that skill. Let me tell you about a few good ones, and how you can use them in your lessons!
Do you also find textbook audio to be super artificial? Are the videos that your textbook uses as out of date, or boring, or both, as mine? I’m always struggling to find fun and authentic spoken text for my students to listen to, because that’s what’s going to help them understand the language best: when it’s like the real thing. I’ve found Youtube super helpful, but recently I’ve gotten into podcasts, and there are some great ones out there! In addition, my free Lush Listening Lesson Cheat Sheet can help you plan your lessons around listening activities! Download it here.
Practice listening to English podcasts first
You do first need to show students what a podcast is. They know video, and God knows they love video, but podcasts are different. When I first teach listening, students don’t know what to do with themselves when it’s only audio. You must prepare them for what’s to come. Tell them it’s only audio; that they won’t be able to see the person that’s speaking. Tell them they may need to concentrate a bit better, because there are no context clues.
Listening practice of English podcasts
So here are some great podcasts for you to check out! I’ve previously used documentary style podcasts, like BBC’s The Documentary Podcast, as well as narrative style ones, like Noble Blood. Another good one is Dear Hank & John (John is John Green, the author of The Fault in our Stars, and Hank is his brother), which answers questions from listeners, and Part-Time Genius does the same, but with absurd questions, like ‘will we ever live without sleep?’
Here’s the list, if you’ve skipped to this part:
The Documentary Podcast
Noble Blood
Dear Hank & John
Part-Time Genius
Exercises to improve listening skills
Now, just listening to these podcasts is going to help your students practice their listening skills, just magically, I promise. But if you teach teenagers, you know they need exercises in order to keep paying attention. I’ve come up with a couple of those, and below I will share some of the ideas I use for these exercises:
1. Listening comprehension questions
These include multiple choice, true/false, matching questions, and open questions. Ask students to answer questions to which they can find the answer in the podcast. You will need to listen to it first yourself in order to create the question. But you can also have students come up with questions themselves for another student.
It’s not super hard to come up with questions, but it is a task that takes time. If you don’t have a lot of that, take a look at the exercises I made. They can be used for any spoken text imaginable, audio or video, and they include, pre-listening, while listening, and after listening exercises. Check them out here!
2. Summarizing
Ask students to summarize the episode. Is it a story, what happened? Did it answer questions, what were the answers? Is it a documentary, what point was it trying to make? Have them use the W and H questions: who, what, where, when, why and how, in order to give a full summary and show their understanding of what they just listened to.
3. Creating their own podcast
What were the characteristics of the podcast you provided? What was the style? If it was an interview, point out that it had questions and answers, that the interviewer and interviewee responded to each other, and that it had a clear introduction and conclusion. Then have students create their own episode in the same style!
4. Teach about text type
This is an extension of #3, since you’ll want to go into more detail about conventions of the types of podcasts that exist. Teach students about the rules of interviews, documentaries and narratives. You can provide examples of the various types of podcasts over the course of a few lessons to get them to understand the differences. And then maybe get students to create all these different types as well!
5. Podcast Pandemonium
Now here is a really fun activity for you: Podcast Pandemonium. If you really want students to find the podcast they’re listening to interesting, you have to get them to choose it themselves! This activity is all about students finding a podcast for their classmates to listen to and create exercises about it.
I usually have 2 students pair up to find a good episode, or part of it, about 10 minutes in length. This pair then also creates an exercise about the content (true/false, multiple choice or open question), and they must prepare a discussion question. This activity gives them ownership of their own learning, a choice, and the autonomy to cover this part of the lesson. My students love it!
Listening practice in English done for you
I created a lesson plan to lead up to doing this activity, since students need to be prepared for it before they can run off and do it. It’s a plan of 5 lessons in which students will first familiarize themselves with existing audio fragments, and then an existing podcast. We go over the types of questions you can ask to check listening comprehension. Again, these are multiple choice, true/false, matching questions, and open questions. And then they must go off and create their own exercise with their choice of podcast.
If you want to use this too in your lessons, check out my lesson plan here!
I hope you’ll give podcasts a chance in your lessons!
To find more articles on listening practice, check out this page!
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